Travel + Leisure India & South Asia’s A-List member and celebrated author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is ready with his new book – Loss. By Kumar Shree
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, the multifaceted personality who effortlessly juggles writing, photography, and a lot more on his plate has penned his new book exploring the themes of mortality, loss, and grief. While Loss is the first non-fiction to come from Siddharth Shanghvi, he has written three fictions earlier, all of which have been international bestsellers and have also garnered positive reviews from the critics.
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Loss is based on Siddharth’s personal experience of dealing with the loss of his parents and then the loss of his pet dachshund, Bruschetta. “In three essays in ‘Loss’, I’ve tried to look in the eye what I have lost; I never thought that everything, and everyone we have lost could mark our character so profoundly,” says Siddharth. “Mostly I have found loss exhausts you; often, it leaves you bitter. And yet it gifts the living something: detachment, a cool cleanness for seeing people as they are, so that you might love them without having to like them,” he adds.
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Talking about the loss of Bruschetta he says, “Her last six months were pain-free. This reminded me of what we owe the ones we love: a brief exemption from the essential anguish of the world. When you learn to look death in the eye, life no longer intimidates you.” He goes on to add,“The only thing we can do for anyone, beyond even love, is to acknowledge them as they are, for whom they are, even if it is to let them go from our lives.”
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Siddharth’s first book The Last Song of Dusk won one of the most prestigious honours for debut novels in the UK — the Betty Trask Award. His second book, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The Rabbit & The Squirrel, his third book came out in 2018 and his latest – Lost is scheduled to come out in the summer of 2020.
